


This Far from the Borderline

by sakuuya



Category: Battle for London in the Air (Roleplay)
Genre: AU rewrite of canon scene, Canon-typical Dr. J, Characters using aliases in dialogue but not in narration, Gen, Immortal Illuminati AU, Partition of India
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:14:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25050739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakuuya/pseuds/sakuuya
Summary: Delhi, 1948: While Dr. Jhandir waits for Cordelia to make contact, he receives an unexpected visitor.
Kudos: 4





	This Far from the Borderline

Dr. Jhandir stubbed out his cigarette as he stared out the window onto the dark street. He knew from experience that he wouldn’t see Cordelia coming before she made contact, and though she wasn’t due for another quarter of an hour, he had nothing better to do. “Chanda Mukherjee” was a clerk, not a doctor, which meant there was no medical literature in the flat. What reading material there was—primarily Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pamphlets and similar political tat—were purely for cover. So when Dr. Jhandir had to, for instance, stay up til two in the morning for IIA business, he had very little to occupy his mind.

And, foolish though it was, that meant he had plenty of time to worry about Cordelia. She was a perfectly capable agent, and in better standing than he was with the home office. That was why she was allowed to initiate contact while he just had to wait to hear from her. Still, as the seconds ticked by, he became more and more convinced that she’d fallen afoul of some gang. The capitol was finally starting to settle down, months after the partition, but he’d narrowly managed to sabotage a bombing a week ago—they weren’t in the clear quite yet. 

He was about to light another cigarette, just to have something to do with his hands, when there was an unfamiliar knock on the door. This block of flats was less than a decade old, and the door had a spyhole—a necessity in Dr. Jhandir’s line of work, and one he was very grateful for now, as there was a  _ man _ outside of his flat at two in the morning. At first, all he could see was dark hair, but when the man shifted, Dr. Jhandir spied a long, pale face that was unpleasantly familiar. Dr. Jhandir didn’t know what the hell Thaddeus Beck was doing in Delhi, but he certainly wasn’t at home to whatever delayed Grand Tour Beck imagined himself to be on.

The doctor leaned against the door as though his weight on it could convince Beck he wasn’t home. Briefly, he thought it worked. Beck knocked once more, and then there was a moment of quiet before Dr. Jhandir heard the distinct scraping of lockpicks. The sound was quiet enough that Dr. Jhandir might not have been able to hear them from farther away but loud enough to mark Beck as an amateur cracksman. The doctor took some pleasure in counting the seconds until Beck managed to pick the cheap lock and push the door open—only a fraction before the chain stopped it.

“What are you doing here?” Dr. Jhandir hissed in English through the narrow opening.

Beck pushed against the door as he answered, and the chain strained against his weight. “I have business of the most urgent nature, Anil.”

“You must have the wrong room; my name is Chanda,” Dr. Jhandir whispered coldly. Beck should have known better than to use his real name in public like this, but then, Beck should also have known not to show up to his flat in the middle of the night with no warning.

“I don’t have time for these petty games, Anil,” Beck said, his voice rising. “Let me in!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Dr. Jhandir could see the door chain starting to pull away from the wall as Beck kept pushing to get in. Stupid, cheap thing. He could have agreed to let Beck in, but instead he waited until the chain failed entirely before he stepped back, leaving Beck to stumble into his flat.

“What do you want,  _ Harold _ ?” Dr. Jhandir repeated as he locked the door again behind Beck.

Beck wasn’t dressed to blend into a Delhi winter. He wasn’t dressed to blend into this century. As he adjusted his ridiculous frock coat, Dr. Jhandir caught a glimpse of a shoulder holster. The doctor was armed only with a knife in his ankle sheath, concealed under his dhoti, so with any luck, it wouldn’t come to blows.

“I hardly think it’s necessary to stand on formalities like false names tonight,” Beck said as his pale eyes flicked around the flat—looking for bugs, perhaps, or just judging the anonymous details of the place. The man never had been any good at subsuming himself in a cover identity.

“And what’s so important about tonight? Aside, of course, from the fact that you’re jeopardizing  _ two years _ of work by barging in on me unannounced. What if a neighbor were to see you, dressed like that?”

Beck shook his head forcefully, sending his too-long hair flying. “You must think me a fool. As though I don’t know what your ‘work’ actually entails!”

In fact, Beck  _ was  _ a fool. Dr. Jhandir doubted Beck had any idea of the human cost of the partition, or the toll it took on him to have to blend in with RSS thugs while covertly trying to help the refugees who were pouring into and out of the city. He could have tried to explain as much, but he didn’t believe that Beck’s chauvinism would brook such a foreign point of view. 

“And what would that be?” he challenged instead.

For the first time since showing up at Dr. Jhandir’s door, Beck lowered his voice to something appropriate for two in the morning. “You may have fooled the rest of the agency, but you can’t fool me. I know you’re working for EVIL.”

“You’re mad!” Dr. Jhandir said, barely able to control his own volume. “I’ve always thought you a bit delusional, but this—”

“Please, Anil, I already told you that I can see right through you. There’s no need to dissemble. Did you think I couldn’t see the pattern? All those deaths you could have avoided, and yet your bloodlust never quite got you consigned to the home office. All those coded messages flying between you and Massey—I don’t even have to read them to know that you’re plotting something terrible. Are you just trying to foment the violence here, or is it even more sinister than that?”

“If you  _ had _ read any of my correspondence with Dr. Massey—not that you’re authorized to do so—you’d know that it’s all ordinary field reports and analysis. What the hell’s gotten into you?”

Beck let out a despairing laugh. “Did you know he’s my father? After I found out, I spent many a sleepless night wondering why he’d pay you any mind, when he could have been spending time with  _ me _ . But I—now I know it’s because he’s a double agent, and he knew—he  _ knew _ that I was too strong of character to ever join him in something so despicable. You, on the other hand, you’re just the type. I’m surprised I didn’t see it sooner.”

He pulled out his pistol with a dramatic flourish. It was an old one, matched to his old-fashioned dress. Dr. Jhandir had been tensed for something like this since he’d glimpsed the gun, so when the shot came, he was ready to dive out of the way, and what might have been a headshot instead only scored a glancing line of pain across his cheek. Beck tried to fire off another shot, but there was only a dull  _ klunk _ sound. That was the risk of choosing a weapon for aesthetic reasons, Dr. Jhandir thought with a smirk that made his cheek burn.

The doctor’s own sidearm, a well-maintained Browning, was in a concealed compartment of his nightstand. It would take him less than a second to open the compartment once he made it to the nightstand—he’d practiced with the mechanism—but further gunshots would only make it more likely that someone would burst in on them. Instead, he reached down to pull out his knife before lunging at Beck.

Beck was already off-balance, trying desperately to fix his revolver, so he couldn’t stop Dr. Jhandir from bearing him to the ground. Dr. Jhandir used the momentum of the fall to slide his thin blade home between Beck’s ribs. Beck scrabbled at it with his free hand, but from the labored, frothy sound of his breathing, it wouldn’t make a difference. Dr. Jhandir yanked the knife out himself, ungently, and sat back to watch Beck die.

On a theoretical level, he was very familiar with the physiology of his fellow immortals, but he’d never killed one before. WIthout first-hand experience, he couldn’t be sure that a blow that would kill an ordinary man would kill something like Beck. Even outside of the spirit of scientific enquiry, though, he couldn’t have forced himself to look away. The pain from his cheek seemed distant, crowded out by a fierce euphoria as he watched Beck spasm and cough.

Immortals, it turned out, died just like anyone else. 

Dr. Jhandir was no assassin, but Beck had been right about one thing: for an influencer, he had killed a fair few people. He’d also lost patients in surgery of course—sterilization of the operating theater hadn’t even been a concept back when he first went through medical school—but that was different. During a failed surgery, he was too occupied with trying to save his patient to observe the death process in any detail. When he killed on a mission (always in self-defense, or close enough to it for plausible deniability), though, he liked to watch, to memorize each little moment of agony as his victim bled out. It was always a heady, powerful feeling, but this, this was better.

He couldn’t say that he’d never fantasized about killing Beck. Many of his colleagues had as well, he suspected. And like them, he’d never really intended to go through with it, if only because killing a fellow agent (even one universally known for his obnoxiousness) would get him kicked out of the IIA. A bullet graze was a small price to pay for the privilege of being the one to end Beck’s life. Dr. Jhandir was so caught up in his own joy that it didn’t didn’t occur to him how the scene might look from the outside until he heard another knock on his door. 

He recognized the specific rhythm, so he called, “Let yourself in!” and tried to look like he was concerned, rather than ecstatic, about the corpse on his cheap rug.

Cordelia had her own key to his flat. As she entered, she said quietly, “Sorry I’m a couple minutes late, Chanda, I got held up—” she stopped abruptly as she registered the scene in front of her. “ _ Harold? _ ”

“He’s dead,” Dr. Jhandir explained, turning so that Cordelia could see the bleeding wound on his cheek. She looked back and forth between them, brows knit. “He burst in here, accused me of working for EVIL, and shot me.”

“So you stabbed him to death. Of course you did.” She sounded tired, but she still went over and turned on the radio to cover the sound of their conversation, just as though this were a normal meeting. AIR was hosting a debate in Hindi about the ongoing sectarian violence; Dr. Jhandir wondered vaguely whether Cordelia could understand it, but he had more pressing concerns.

“Helena, he would have killed me! What was I supposed to do? The only reason he didn’t shoot me dead is because his revolver failed! Check for yourself.”

Cordelia crouched down to do so, holding the trailing edge of her sari up out of the pooled blood. She kept her gaze on Dr. Jhandir even as she bent down to retrieve Beck’s gun, and the doctor belatedly realized that he was still holding his knife. He set it on the floor and slid it toward her with his foot, to show that he meant no harm.

When Cordelia tried to unlatch the revolver, it stuck. “Did he ever clean this?” she asked, seemingly to herself. She looked up at Dr. Jhandir and added, “He accused you of working for EVIL?”

“ _ Falsely  _ accused. I know I have a bit of a reputation, but Helena, I swear I’m not a double agent.” If Beck’s stupid, malicious lies ruined him from beyond the grave, he’d—well, he didn’t know what he’d do. Something, surely.

“No, I wasn’t accusing you. He”—Cordelia sighed—”I heard through the grapevine that Harold was acting erratic. Paranoid. And then, three days ago, he went rogue and disappeared from his assignment in St. Moritz. I didn’t expect him to turn up here.”   
  


“Should I be flattered that he abandoned his post just to come murder me?” Dr. Jhandir asked sarcastically.

“Look, I’m sure it’s been a long night, but there’s no need for that. He may have been… troubled, and I believe you were acting in self-defense, but Harold was an IIA agent, same as us. Please don’t be snide.”

“You and he were a couple once, weren’t you?” At her look of surprise, he added, “Andrew told me. Do you… need a minute alone with him? To say goodbye? I can patch myself up on the balcony.”

It was a chilly night, and he didn’t want to show his bullet wound to the whole street, even at such a late hour. But he’d often been accused of an insufficient bedside manor, and after Cordelia had been willing to believe the truth about Beck, he didn’t want her to think poorly of him.

She shook her head. “It was a long time ago. Lifetimes, really. I finished mourning him well before you killed him. After enough time passes, even the worst mistakes can metamorphose into being simply annoying colleagues.”

Despite her claim to not need time to mourn, Cordelia was silent for a minute, head bowed. Dr. Jhandir paused in his search for his first aid kit out of respect for her, though not for Beck.

When Cordelia looked up again, she said, “Do you remember what exactly he said to you? I wish I could understand what he was thinking, to do something so erratic.”

Dr. Jhandir bit back his first reply, that he could imagine any height of stupidity from Thaddeus Beck. “He said that my, ah, disciplinary history proved I was working with EVIL, and accused me of egging on the riots here. Not just me, either—he thought I was involved in some kind of conspiracy with Dr. Massey.”

“Dr. Massey?” Cordelia asked, eyes narrowed.

“Quite. I assume Harold roped him into this nonsense simply because I report to him, but he may have had a more personal reason.”

“What do you mean?”

“Harold was convinced that he was Massey’s son, and he felt betrayed because his ‘father’ showed more interest in me than in him. As though the difference in our ability wasn’t enough to explain that”—Cordelia gave him a  _ look _ , so he changed tack—”Now that I say it aloud, he may have concocted this entire delusion because he was jealous. Hold this mirror, would you?”

Cordelia seemed distant as she held up the hand mirror so the doctor could better examine his wound. It had bled profusely, crusting the whole side of his face, but the bleeding had slowed now, and it didn’t look deep enough for stitches. 

“You’re probably right,” she said, but still seemed somehow unconvinced. Dr. Jhandir didn’t pry, letting a tense silence fall between them as he cleaned and dressed his cheek. 

Once he’d finished and packed away his kit, it was back to business. He asked, “Do you want to call a cleaner, or shall I?”

“I’ll do it once I’m gone. Just in case anyone’s monitoring your communication.”   


“I  _ do  _ check the place for bugs regularly,” Dr. Jhandir replied, a little defensively.

“Sorry. I guess I’m a little shook up tonight after all. Humor an old lady’s nerves, would you?”

“Fine.”

“And Chanda… You know the higher-ups may decide to pull you out over this, right? I’ll do what I can, but I’ve only got so much clout.”

“ _ What? _ ” he growled. “I could have injured my face in any number of ways. And even with the hospitals overcrowded, it’s entirely plausible that I found someone to patch me up.”

“I think the home office’ll be more worried about the body in your flat than that scratch on your face.”

Dr. Jhandir scowled. “My work here is important, and I’ve put years into this identity. Besides,  _ I’m _ not the one who went thousands of miles out of my way to try and murder a fellow agent.”

“I know that,” Cordelia said, “And I’ll stick up for you as much as I can. I just want you to be prepared if worst comes to worst.”

He gave Beck’s corpse a little kick out of pure spite before sitting heavily on the bed. “I always am.”


End file.
